


i ask for a prayer

by 127AM (hotmess_ex_press)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, Character Study, Hopeful Ending, Immortality, M/M, Slow Romance, jaehyun as persephone&ten as hades, kinda?? ne ways happy bday to me :-)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:07:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27892024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotmess_ex_press/pseuds/127AM
Summary: The world has bloomed with love and spring for a thousand generations. Jaehyun is young, and he does not know much but he is learning.
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12





	i ask for a prayer

Jaehyun tumbles into the world, springs forth from a bed of flowers and the air is soft, the water is finer than crystal, and the earth gives and gives.

Sicheng sees him then, rising as if from sleep and clothed in sunrise and hair dotted in baby's breath, and loves him in a heartbeat, cradles him in the grass and swears to keep him sweet and blooming.

Sicheng is a lover, but more than that a father, more than that a prison. Hair like golden wheat and soil-kissed fingertips and goodness as green as the skin behind Jaehyun's ears. He kisses Jaehyun's shoulder the way roots strain into clay and hold fast, and there in Sicheng's hidden grove of dirt and sunlight Jaehyun knows life. He knows the lullaby of bees, and he knows the sighs of the nymphs as they turn away from him, and he knows peaches and lilacs. Blossoms weave between his hair and ten thousand suns are felled by Helios' deft hands, and most of all he knows loneliness.

The bluebells whisper of his loveliness, then the busybody reeds, then the sparrows sing it across the mortal lands. Berries swell near to bursting and honeysuckle weigh heavy on their branches.

"I love you," Sicheng smiles. Gentle like growth. "I'll keep you safe."

Jaehyun knows sunrise, and he knows wind tangling across his skin, the velvet warble of his own voice as he croons to the daffodils. He lies in the afternoon-warm grass and each blade murmurs a tale in his ear.

Like this, he learns of fire, and the mercy of the gods. Of wrath,and passion, and want. Like this, he learns of _life_ , of love so ripe it taunts its own immortality.

Ichor caresses his veins, and his heart caresses a tangible ache.

At the beginning and end of it all, the first brother scrubbed shadow from his eyes and drew the shortest stick, fell upon the darkest throne.

Prayers flow from his eyes and he has almost forgotten his name. Unseen one, host of many, giver of good council, god of many names--but when he was crashing down his father's gullet he was _Ten_. Rumors trickle slow through the sediments of the earth, and a hundred generations of grief crawl down his cheeks before he learns of that fabled beauty, smile so honeyed fruit trees bow before it, laden with their sweetest fruit.

Well, gods have always been selfish.

Jaehyun gasps when the flower of a hundred silken petals and the fragrance of a hundred kingdoms he will never know--torn through the soil with a beckoning, decadent ease--drags him down into shadow as his knuckles sketch its stem. He gasps but he is not surprised; he has braided clover around his ankles and he knows begonia, arbutus, jonquil, but he doesn't know this, has no name for the bloom that bites his fingertips with rows of petal-soft teeth.

The plummet is icy. Jaehyun closes his eyes to the blur of it all.

When his vision glides back to color he is pressed like a flower into the spine of an obsidian throne, and endless souls sing their woe to him. His pale pink chiton puckers like a lily around his thighs. The earth is young but not so naive as she once was, and her heart grows cold at the center of it, the stagnant air kissing Jaehyun's knuckles scarlet.

The king of the underworld has blood in his eyes and wears his unanswered prayers as a noose. At the base of his own stolen throne, at Jaehyun's bare feet dripping in wilting clover, he kneels with his crown pressed to his chest and smiles as if he is clean.

He is beautiful the way starless, breathless dark is. Jaehyun tastes bone.

He looks down at the flower still curled around his fingers. Its pollen glitters like diamond, and Jaehyun wonders how the god of the dead could create such a beautiful thing before the petals crumble in with a sigh, the stem eats itself into dust. Decay runs down the channels of Jaehyun's palms and the diamond was only ash to begin with.

The host of many has hair glossy as strands pulled from a raven's feather and parts his lips for blunt teeth and a sweetly curling tongue. Jaehyun cannot see to the bottoms of his eyes and he does not know much, but he is learning.

The gracious one wears robes of rippling black, slashed lengthwise to part around ice-white legs. Ribbons and pearls, emerald combs and spiraling silver cuffs, he gifts Jaehyun his adoration in diadems that gnash at his hair and a dozen rings for each finger.

Jaehyun can see the gold beneath the god's skin when he moves too fast, heels coiled with dance that has slumbered for centuries and shoulders spilling from his draping robes like rising suns.

Each time the old god grazes a kiss to his fingertips, to his adorned knuckles and the tender swell of his palm, Jaehyun trembles and gulps down his sorrow to lap erosion against the walls of his stomach. The lord of the underworld offers his name as a second heart, cupped between cold hands and fluttering, and Jaehyun has not known bareness like this since he pulled the true-names from the foxglove trumpets. Out of the stone carcass of the underworld Ten carves him a hundred rooms of gemstone that beam with shy translucence in the darkness, and with pink and palest sapphire clouding his cheeks Jaehyun knows cold, learns the tremor and click of bone in feigned warmth.

Seated on the bitter throne, Jaehyun gazes into the past with Ten's crown tilted over his eyes. The souls are wailing and Jaehyun has learned the dips and waverings of their collective melody, has settled into the weary cadence of it.

"My Sicheng," he whispers, filled with honey and soil and glistening wheat at the feel of his name, though Ten is the one knelt between his thighs and tracing hymns in nail and breath at the groove of Jaehyun's hip. "He'll be missing me."

"Yes, yes, _your_ Sicheng," Ten's voice is lilting, but he's drawing back and his tongue is salt. "What of me?"

Jaehyun swallows and remembers blue-tinged days of sunlight.

"Imagine, my darling," Ten sighs and his eyelashes cast webs of shadow down his cheeks, distorting into blueblack tears. "I am the only brother left unsatisfied. Guanheng is content frolicking in the warm oceans day and night, even Dejun is happy with his simple hearth, his simple home. Yukhei, he is the king of the heavens and the gods and might as well be king of the living, might as well be king of me. And Sicheng..."

His lips furl and his smile is a butterfly wing, torn from its sky and skeleton and left to wither.

"Well, he has _you_."

Ten turns his head all coy and slight, and presses that dying smile to the cowslip-flesh of Jaehyun's thigh. His lips slip open as if searching for honey, hungry for another ambrosia, fingertips trailing gentle down Jaehyun's calves and cupping his ankles like pearls in the starved caverns of his palms.

Eyes flashing dark and sudden, Ten's tone dips into poison and he is half unthinkable power, half devastating tenderness. "What of me?"

Ten's realm sprawls into eternity and he lives swirled through the veins of every living thing, though they have blended his name into a curse and a secret steeped in holy fear. Jaehyun swallows once, swallows twice and his leg is wrapping closer to Ten's waist. "I thought you were happy with your lot, oh wealthy one."

Ten grins sharply: he is a knife's edge and he is not worshiped with love. Jaehyun draws his heel up Ten's back and maybe he is meant to dull Ten's whetted emptiness.

"I could be happier."

The earth is old, and Jaehyun has been undying for too few of her lessons. He does not know the language of love, the tongues and legs and nectar of it. He does not know its undulations or sugar-light words. He does not know want, though he has been whispered feverish stories of it. He pulls his leg back in shame, and Ten glances away.

In his despair and rage, Sicheng's goodness runs dry and mortals' stomachs twist with hunger the way their barren trees twist into the grey sky. Green bleeds from the ground and through the gates of the underworld in the form of shades gaunt with starvation. The earth grows desolate beneath Jaehyun's absence and the soil is a wound that will not clot.

Each night, a feast is laid out before Jaehyun. The fruits glisten with ripeness, spices breath their sweet steam into the air, and Ten is a hundred table settings away. Jaehyun does not eat and unseen hands clear a cold feast away as his cheeks sink into themselves. Though Jaehyun is too far to catch it, Ten's eyes shimmer with regret, and wine stains his lips like fractured rubies, like breaking hearts.

Ten is regal, lovely and silver-poured, lounging across his throne. He plays a good king, he plays rich and cruel and carnal but he never had a chance to drink down the sun before he sunk through the stone of the earth into the impenetrable shadow of the underworld. His fate is drenched in endless night and swaddled by time-roughened rock, but a single tear tumbles from his eyelashes as he banishes a soul to the deepest pit of his kingdom and the choir of shades keens louder, louder.

Jaehyun's chiton is cream like the velvet insides of a rose, and he wears only one ring when he steals into the throne room and settles pretty and soft on the arm of the throne. Ten doesn't look up but his hand flits to Jaehyun's waist, catching in the fabric there like he can't help it and he is much, much warmer than Jaehyun ever thought he could be.

The last of the shades are dragged into their places and you are never alone in the underworld but Ten sways forward, head falling to Jaehyun's lap.

Jaehyun strokes slow fingertips through Ten's hair and lets his desire well in his palms. And he's never learned devotion, but sweetpea blossoms beneath his touch and climbs in melancholy pink over the jagged peaks of Ten's crown, swallows it in delicately splaying petals and winding threads of green stem. Primrose weaves itself through Ten's hair and when Jaehyun tips Ten's face up boldly, cradles his jaw like glass, he's never known anything more inviting of reverence.

Ten smiles, faint and sugared, and keeps his eyelashes slotted over his gaze. He has been alone longer than Jaehyun has been immortal and his fingertips skim over Jaehyun's wrist carefully, and maybe he is relearning.

Missing dirt beneath his feet, Jaehyun wanders in the asphodel fields until he loses himself.

Ten finds him, with asphodel pinched between his fingertips, and smiles under the weight of tenderness.

And it is still not enough, but Jaehyun asks, _"lie with me awhile."_ It is not enough and Ten eases down beside him, brushes his knuckles down Jaehyun's throat and snags a lingering touch in the hair at Jaehyun's nape, cups the back of his neck as if Jaehyun is nectar and will siphon away into flower-matter if Ten stops touching.

While the earth hungers, Ten's lips ghost over his collarbone and he feels drunk, too dizzy. It is not enough, and Jaehyun would give anything to trace Ten's features in full sunlight, spilling with molten gold and dazzling.

In the chambers of the god of many titles, Yangyang finds them and lowers to one knee with Sicheng's demands curdling on his tongue.

"Please," he gasps once Sicheng's orders run dry, and the wings at his ankles tremble like half-rotted leaves on the branch. "The world needs you back."

Jaehyun's wrists rustle with gold. He has grown into the underworld as well as any rose could, and Ten's gaze flickers away from him.

"I can't," he says.

"You must," Ten replies after too many heartbeats, smile twisting into shadow. _Oh_ , gods are selfish creatures but Ten is the eldest of six realms and he is used to misfortune, used to the hollow a cappella of asphodel fields in an eternal dusk. Ten knows his fate in his bones and it is lonely; Jaehyun has grown slim and wanting.

There is more to life than earth and sea and sun. From the stand beside Ten's bed, Jaehyun plucks a pomegranate, grips it solidly between his hands and breathes deep. Lingering glances, the warmth of palms. Ten's fluid, aching grace. He knows it all now, all that is hidden beneath the earth's loam and sacred. The pomegranate splits down the middle.

"Jaehyun," Ten exhales. Bruises swell beneath his eyes and he is good, too gracious and unlucky and deserving of something kind, anything sweet. Jaehyun moves close enough to feel his warmth and presses a pomegranate half into his hand, returns its shining seeds to his own grasp, one by one.

Six, he counts out, and sees Ten's nails curl into the crimson armor of the fruit's flesh. His eyelashes sweep beneath his cautious gaze and he is beautiful. Jaehyun does not love him, but he could learn.

He breaks the seeds against his tongue, then breaks his mouth against Ten's.

A thousand miles above them, the soil opens, and flowers begin to bloom.

**Author's Note:**

> hope u enjoyed, comments and kudos are love <3


End file.
